nikolayeusk seemed to me the ends of the earth. i hardly know why it should have done so, for i arrived there by way of a very comfortable steamer and i have made my way to very much more ungetatable places. i suppose the explanation is that all the other places i have visited i had looked up so long on the map that when i arrived i only felt i was attaining the goal i had set out to reach, whereas i must admit i had never heard of nikolayeusk till mr sly, the british consul, sketched it out as the end of my itinerary on the siberian rivers, and ten days later i found myself in the far eastern town. i remember one of my brothers writing to me once from petropaulovski:
“i always said my address would some day be kamseatkha and here i am!”
well, i never said my address would be nikolayeusk because i had never heard of it, but here i was nevertheless. the weather was warm, the sun poured down from a cloudless blue sky, and in the broad, grass-grown streets, such streets have i seen in australian towns, when the faint breeze stirred the yellow dust rose on the air. and the town straggled all along the northern side of the river, a town of low, one-storeyed wooden houses for the most part, with an occasional two-storeyed house and heavy shutters to all the windows. there was a curious absence of stone, and the streets when they were paved at all were, as in kharbarosvk, lines of planks, sometimes three, sometimes five planks wide, with a waste of dust or mud or grass, as the case might be, on either side.
the russians i found kindness itself. in vladivostok i had met a man who knew one of my brothers—i sometimes wonder if i could get to such a remote corner of the earth that i should not meet someone who knew one of these ubiquitous brothers of mine—and this good friend, having sampled the family, took me on trust and found someone else who would give me a letter to the manager of the russo-asiatic bank at nikolayeusk. this was a godsend, for mr pauloff spoke excellent english, and he and his corresponding clerk, a russian lady of middle age who had spent a long time in france, took me in hand and showed me the sights. madame schulmann and i and buchanan drove all over the town in one of the most ancient victorias i have ever seen—the most ancient are in saghalien, which is beyond the ends of the earth—and she very kindly took me to a meal at the principal hotel. i was staying on board the steamer while i looked around me. the visit with this lady decided me not to go there. it wras about four o'clock in the afternoon, so i don't know whether our meal was dinner or tea or luncheon; we had good soup, i remember, and nice wine, to say nothing of excellent coffee, but the atmosphere left much to be desired. i don't suppose the windows ever had been opened since the place was built, and no one seemed to see any necessity for opening them. my hostess smiled at my distress. she said she liked fresh air herself but that for a whole year she had lodged in a room where the windows would not open. she had wanted to have one of the panes—not the window, just one of the panes—made to open to admit fresh air, and had offered to do it at her own expense, but her landlord refused. it would spoil the look of the room. she advised me strongly if i wanted fresh air to stay as long as i could on board the steamer at the wharf, and i decided to take her advice.
the russo-asiatic bank was not unlike the banks i have seen in australian townships, in that it was built of wood of one storey and the manager and his wife lived on the premises, but the roof was far more ornamental than australia could stand and gave the touch of the east that made for romance. the manager was good enough to ask me to dinner and to include buchanan in the invitation because i did not like to leave the poor little chap shut up in my cabin. this was really dinner, called so, and we had it at five o'clock of a hot summer's afternoon, a very excellent dinner, with delicious sour cream in the soup and excellent south australian wine, not the stuff that passes for australian wine in england and that so many people take medicinally, but really good wine, such as australians themselves drink. the house was built with a curious lack of partitions that made for spaciousness, so that you wandered from one room to another, hardly knowing that you had gone from the sitting-room to the bedroom, and james buchanan going on a voyage of discovery unfortunately found the cradle, to the dismay of his mistress. he stood and looked at it and barked.
“gracious me! what's this funny thing! i've never seen anything like it before!”
neither had i; but i was covered with shame when a wail proclaimed the presence of the son and heir.
naturally i expressed myself—truly—charmed with the town, and mr pauloff smiled and nodded at his wife, who spoke no english.
“she hates it,” said he; “she has never been well since we came here.”
she was white, poor little girl, as the paper on which this is written, and very frail-looking, but it never seemed to occur to anyone that it would be well to open the double windows, and so close was the air of the room that it made me feel sick and faint.
“she never goes out,” said her husband. “she is not well enough.”
i believe there was a time in our grandmothers' days when we too dreaded the fresh air.
and in this the town differed markedly from any australian towns i have known. the double windows were all tight shut these warm july days, with all the cracks stopped up with cotton wool, with often decorations of coloured ribbons or paper wandering across the space between. also there were very heavy shutters, and i thought these must be to shut out the winter storms, but m. pauloff did not seem to think much of the winter storms, though he admitted they had some bad blizzards and regularly the thermometer went down below -40° fahrenheit.
“no,” he said, “we shut them at night, at four in the winter and at nine in the summer. leave them open you cannot.”
“but why?” i thought it was some device for keeping out still more air.
“there is danger,” said he—“danger from men.”
“do they steal?” said i, surprised.
“and kill,” he added with conviction.
it seems that when the japanese invaded saghalien, the great island which lies opposite the mouth of the amur, they liberated at least thirty thousand convicts, and they burnt the records so that no one could prove anything against them, and the majority of these convicts were unluckily not all suffering political prisoners, but criminals, many of them of the deepest dye. these first made saghalien an unwholesome place to live in, but gradually they migrated to the mainland, and nikolayeusk and other towns of eastern siberia are by no means safe places in consequence. madame schulmann told me that many a time men were killed in the open streets and that going back to her lodgings on the dark winter evenings she was very much afraid and always tried to do it in daylight.
nikolayeusk is officially supposed to have thirteen thousand inhabitants, but really in the winter-time, says mr pauloff, they shrink to ten thousand, while in the summer they rise to over forty thousand, everybody coming for the fishing, the great salmon fisheries.
“here is noting,” said he, “noting—only fish.”
and this remark he made at intervals. he could not reiterate it too often, as if he were warning me against expecting too much from this remote corner of the world. but indeed the fish interested me. the summer fishing was on while i was there, but that, it seems, is as nothing to the autumn fishing, when the fish rush into the wide river in solid blocks. the whole place then is given over to the fishing and the other trades that fishing calls into being to support it. all the summer the steamers coming down the river are crowded, and they bring great cargoes of timber; the wharves when i was there were covered with barrels and packing-cases containing, according to mr pauloff, “only air.” these were for the fish. and now, when the humble mackerel costs me at least ninepence or a shilling, i remember with longing the days when i used to see a man like a chinaman, but not a chinaman, a bamboo across his shoulder, and from each end a great fresh salmon slung, a salmon that was nearly as long as the bearer, and i could have bought the two for ten kopecks!
he that will not when he may!
but great as the trade was down the river, most eatables—groceries, flour and such-like things—came from shanghai, and the ships that brought them took back wood to be made into furniture, and there was, when i was there, quite a flourishing trade in frozen meat with australia, nikolayeusk requiring about two hundred and forty thousand pounds in the year. in winter, of course, all the provisions are frozen; the milk is poured into basins, a stick is stuck in it and it freezes round it, so that a milk-seller instead of having a large can has an array of sticks on top of which is the milk frozen hard as a stone. milk, meat, eggs, all provisions are frozen from october to may.
i do not know what nikolayeusk is doing now war and revolution have reached it. at least they have brought it into touch with the outer world.
and having got so far i looked longingly out over the harbour and wondered whether i might not go to saghalien.
mr pauloff laughed at my desires. if there was nothing to see in nikolayeusk, there was less than nothing in saghalien. it was dead. it never had been much and the japanese invasion had killed it. not that he harboured any animosity against the japanese. russians and japanese, he declared, were on very friendly terms, and though they invaded saghalien they did not disgrace their occupation by any atrocities. the russian, everybody declared in nikolayeusk, bridges the gulf between the white man and the yellow. russian and chinese peasants will work side by side in friendliest fashion; they will occupy the same boardinghouses; the russian woman does not object to the chinese as a husband, and the russian takes a chinese wife. of course these are the peasant classes. the russian authorities made very definite arrangements for keeping out chinese from siberia, as i saw presently when i went back up the river.
but the more i thought of it the more determined i was not to go back till i had gone as far east as i possibly could go. the russian volunteer fleet i found called at alexandrovsk regularly during the months the sea was open, making nikolayeusk its most northern port of call. i could go by the steamer going down and be picked up by the one coming north. it would give me a couple of days in the island, and mr pauloff was of opinion that a couple of days would be far too long.
but the john cockerill was going back and buchanan and i must find another roof and a resting-place. according to the inhabitants, it would not be safe to sleep in the streets, and i had conceived a distinct distaste for the hotel. but the erivan lay in the stream and to that we transferred ourselves and our belongings, where the mate spoke english with a strong glasgow accent and the steward had a smattering. it was only a smattering, however. i had had a very early lunch and no afternoon tea, so when i got on board at six in the evening i was decidedly hungry and demanded food, or rather when food might be expected. the steward was in a dilemma. it was distinctly too early for dinner, he considered, and too late for tea. he scratched his head.
“lunch!” said he triumphantly, and ushered me into the saloon, where hung large photographs of the tsar, the tsarina and the good-looking little tsarevitch. in the corner was an ikon, st nicolas, i think, who protects sailors. and there at six o'clock in the evening i meekly sat down to luncheon all by myself.
lying there i had a lovely view of the town. at night, like vladivostok, it lay like a ring of diamonds along the shore of the river; and in the daytime the softly rounded green hills, the grey-blue sky and the grey-blue sea with the little white wavelets, and the little town just a line between the green and the blue, with the spires and domes of the churches and other public buildings, green and blue and red and white, made a view that was worth coming so far to see. there were ships in the bay too—not very big ships; but a ship always has an attraction: it has come from the unknown; it is about to go into the unknown—and as i sat on deck there came to me the mate with the scots accent and explained all about the ships in sight.
the place was a fort and they were going to make it a great harbour, to fill it up till the great ships should lie along the shore. it will take a good time, for we lay a long way out, but he never doubted the possibility; and meantime the goods come to the ships in the lighters in which they have already come down the river, and they are worked by labourers getting, according to the mate, twelve shillings a day.
“dey carry near as much as we do,” said he.
then there were other ships: a ship for fish, summer fish, for japan, sealers for the rookeries, and ships loading timber for kamseatkha. i thought i would like to emulate my brother and go there, and the russky mate thought it would be quite possible, only very uncomfortable. it would take three months, said he, and it was rather late in the season now. besides, these ships load themselves so with timber that there is only a narrow space on deck to walk on, and they are packed with passengers, mostly labourers, going up for the short summer season.
my old trouble, want of air, followed me on board the erivan. on deck it was cool, at night the thermometer registered about 55° fahrenheit, but in my cabin buehanan and i gasped with the thermometer at over 90°, and that with the port, a very small one, open. that stuffiness was horrible. the bathroom looked like a boiler with a tightfitting iron door right amidships, and having looked at it i had not the courage to shut myself in and take a bath. it seemed as if it would be burying myself alive. as it was, sleep down below i could not, and i used to steal up on deck and with plenty of rugs and cushions lay myself out along the seats and sleep in the fresh air; but a seat really does leave something to be desired in the way of luxury.
but the early mornings were delightful. the first faint light showed a mist hanging over the green hills marking out their outlines, green and blue and grey; then it was all grey mist; but to the east was the crimson of the dawn, and we left our moorings early one morning and steamed into that crimson. the sun rose among silver and grey clouds, and rose again and again as we passed along the river and the mountains hid him from sight. there were long streaks of silver on the broad river; slowly the fir-clad hills emerged from the mist and the air was moist and fragrant; the scent of the sea and the fragrance of the pines was in it. a delicious, delicate northern sunrise it was; never before or since have i seen such a sunrise. never again can i possibly see one more beautiful.
and the great river widened. there were little settlements, the five-pointed tents of the russian soldiers and many places for catching fish. no wonder the fish—fish is always salmon here—like this great -wide river. the brownish water flowed on swiftly and the morning wind whipped it into never-ending ripples that caught the sunlight. a wonderful river! a delightful river! i have grown enthusiastic over many rivers. i know the murray in my own land and the great rivers of tropical africa, the congo, the gambia, the volta, grand and lovely all of them. i felt i had looked upon the glory of the lord when i had looked upon them, but there was something in the tender beauty of the amur, the summer beauty veiled in mist, the beauty that would last so short a time, that was best of all.
meanwhile the passengers and officers of the erivan were much exercised in their minds over me. what could an englishwoman want in saghalien? to my surprise i found that none had ever stayed there before, though it was on record that one had once landed there from a steamer. the mate was scathing in his remarks.
“dere are skeeters,” said he, “big ones, i hear,” and he rolled his “r's” like a true scotsman.
“but where can i stay?” he shook his head.
“in de hotel you cannot stay. it is impossible.” that i could quite believe, but all the same, if the hotel was impossible, where could i stay?
however, here i was, and i did not intend to go back to vladivostok by sea. at alexandrosvk, the town of saghalien, i proposed to land and i felt it was no good worrying till i got there.
we entered de castries bay in a soft grey mist, a mist that veiled the mountains behind. then the mist lifted and showed us the string of islands that guard the mouth of the bay, strung in a line like jewels set in the sea, and the hills on them were all crowned with firs; and then the mist dropped again, veiling all things.
it was a lonely place, where i, being a foreigner, was not allowed to land, and we did not go close up to the shore, but the shore came to us in great white whale-boats. many peasants and soldiers got off here, and i saw saws and spades in the bundles, the bundles of emigrants. there were a few women amongst them, women with hard, elemental faces, so different from the chinese, that were vacuous and refined. i remembered the women who had listened to the lecturer at fen chou fu and i drew a long sigh of relief. it was refreshing to look at those big-hipped women, with their broad, strong feet and their broad, strong hands and the little dirty kerchiefs over their heads. elemental, rough, rude, but i was glad of them. one was suckling a child in the boat, calmly, as if it were the most natural thing to do, and somehow it was good to see it. the beginning of life.
the morning brought a dense mist, and as it cleared away it showed us a sparkling, smooth sea, greyish-blue like the skies above it, and a little wooden town nestling against fir-clad hills. we had arrived at alexandrosvk and i wondered what would become of me.
and then once again i learned what a kind place is this old world of ours that we abuse so often. i had gone on board that steamer without any introduction whatever, with only my passport to show that i was a respectable member of society. i knew nobody and saw no reason whatever why anyone should trouble themselves about me. but we carried distinguished passengers on board the erivan. there was the vice-governor of saghalien, his wife and son, with the soldiers in attendance, and a good-looking young fellow with short-cropped hair and dreamy eyes who was the assistant chief of police of the island, and this man, by command of the governor, took me in charge.
never again shall i hear of the russian police without thinking of the deep debt of gratitude that i owe to vladimir merokushoff of saghalien.
i do not think as a rule that people land from steamers at alexandrosvk on to red tapestry carpets under fluttering bruiting to the strains of a band. but we did; and the chief of police—he spoke no language but russian—motioned me to wait a moment, and when the governor had been safely despatched to his home he appeared on the scene with a victoria and drove me and buchanan to the police station, a charming little one-storeyed building buried in greenery, and there he established us. buchanan he appreciated as a dog likes to be appreciated, and he gave up to me his own bedroom, where the top pane of the window had actually been made to open. his sitting-room was a very bower of growing plants, and when i went to bed that night he brought his elderly working housekeeper, a plain-faced woman whom he called “stera,” and made her bring her bed and lay it across my door, which opened into the sitting-room. it was no good my protesting; there she had to sleep. poor old thing, she must have been glad my stay was not long. every day she wore a blue skirt and a drab-coloured blouse, unbelted, and her grey hair twisted up into an untidy knot behind, but she was an excellent cook. that young man got himself into his everyday holland summer coat and to entertain me proceeded to lay in enough provisions to supply a hungry school. he showed me the things first to see if i liked them, as if i wouldn't have liked shark when people were so kind. but as a matter of fact everything was very good. he produced a large tin of crawling crayfish, and when i had expressed not only my approval but my delight, they appeared deliciously red and white for dinner, and then i found they were only sakouska—that is, the hors d'ouvre that the russians take to whet their appetites. i have often lived well, but never better than when i, a stranger and a sojourner, was taken in charge by the hospitable russian police, who would not let me pay one penny for my board and lodging. we fed all day long. i had only to come in for a bottle of wine or beer to be produced. i was given a gens d'arme to carry my camera and another to take care of buchanan. never surely was stranger so well done as i by hospitable saghalien. the policeman made me understand he was an author and presented me with a couple of pamphlets he had written on saghalien and its inhabitants, but though i treasure them i cannot read them. then the japanese photographer was sent for and he and i were taken sitting side by side on the bench in his leafy porch, and, to crown all, because i could speak no russian, he sent for two girls who had been educated in japan and who spoke english almost as well as i did myself, though they had never before spoken to an englishwoman. marie and lariss borodin were they, and their father kept the principal store in alexandrosvk. they were dainty, pretty, dark-eyed girls and they were a godsend to me. they had a tea in my honour and introduced me to the manager of the coal mine of saghalien and took care i should have all the information about the island it was in their power to supply.
there were then about five thousand people there, one thousand in alexandrosvk itself, but they were going daily, for the blight of the convict was over the beautiful land. the best coal mine is closed down on fire and the one whose manager i met was leased to a company by the year and worked by chinese on most primitive lines. there is gold, he told me, this business man who surprised me by his lavish use of perfume, but he did not know whether it would pay for working—gold and coal as well would be almost too much good luck for one island—and there is naphtha everywhere on the east coast, but as it has never been struck they think that the main vein must come up somewhere under the sea. still it is there waiting for the enterprising man who shall work it.
saghalien used to be as bad as nikolayeusk, they told me, after the japanese had evacuated the northern part; but now the most enterprising section of the convicts had betaken themselves to the mainland, and though the free settlers were few and far between, and the most of the people i saw were convicts, they were the harmless ones with all the devilment gone out of them.
alexandrosvk is a place of empty houses. when the japanese came the people fled, leaving everything exactly as it was; and though the japanese behaved with admirable restraint, considering they came as an invading army, many of these people never came back again, and the alertness in a bad cause which had sent many of the convicts there against their will sent them away again as soon as they were free. all down by the long wooden pier which stretches out into the sea are great wooden storehouses and barracks, empty, and a monument, if they needed it, to the courteous manner in which the japanese make war. they had burnt the museum, they told me, and opened the prison doors and burnt the prison, but the other houses they had spared. and so there were many, many empty houses in alexandrosvk.
all the oldest carriages in the world have drifted to saghalien.
they are decrepit in western siberia, they are worse, if possible, in the east, but in the island of saghalien i really don't know how they hold together. perhaps they are not wanted very often. i hired the most archaic victoria i have ever seen and the two girls came for a drive with me all round the town and its neighbourhood. it was a drive to be remembered. the early summer was in all its full freshness, the red and white cows stood knee-deep in grass that was green and lush everywhere. there were fir-trees on the hills and on every spur of the hills, and there were hedges with dog-roses blossoming all over them; there were fields of dark blue iris; there were little red tiger lilies and a spiked heliotrope flower like veronica, only each bloom grew on a single stalk of its own; there were purple vetches and white spir?a growing in marshy places, and the land was thick with sweet-scented clover among which the bees were humming, and in a little village there was a greek church that, set in its emerald-green field, was a very riot of colour. there were balls on the roof of royal blue, the roof itself was of pale green, the walls were of brown logs untouched by paint and the window edges were picked out in white. i photographed that picturesque little church, as i did the peasant women standing at the doors of their log huts and the queer old shandrydan in which we drove, but alas! all my photographs perished miserably in russia. the girls wondered that i liked town and country so much, that i saw so much beauty in everything.
“ah! madame,” they sighed, “but you can go away tomorrow! if only we could go!”
they had been educated at a convent and they produced the english books they had read. they were very apologetic but they had found them rather tame. had i read them? i smiled, for they all turned out to be the immortal works of charles garvice!
and we had tea in the dining-room, where father slept because they were rather crowded, the store took up so much room; and it was a very nice tea too, with raspberry jam in saucers, which we ate russian fashion with a spoon, and the roses in the garden tapped against the window-panes, asking to come in and join us, and buchanan got what his soul loved, plenty of cake. they apologised because there was no fruit. no fruit save berries ripen in saghalien and the strawberries would not be ready till well on in august. no words of mine can tell how kind they were to the stranger.
i went back in the long twilight that was so cool and restful and sat outside the leafy shaded police station and killed mosquitoes, for the mate had heard aright, there were “skeeters” and to spare, the sort to which mark twain took a gun. i watched the grey mist creeping slowly down, down the beautiful mountains, and when it had enveloped them the night was come and it was time to go in and have dinner and go to bed.
perhaps it would not do to stay long in saghalien. there is nothing to do. she lies a sleeping beauty waiting the kiss of the prince. will this war awaken her? the short time i was there i enjoyed every moment.
the people seemed nondescript. the upper class were certainly russians, and all the men wore military caps and had their hair clipped so close it looked shaven, but it would be utterly impossible to say to what nationality the peasant belonged. there were flaxen-haired russians certainly, but then there were dark-bearded men, a mongolian type, and there were many thrifty chinese with queues, in belted blouses and high boots, generally keeping little eating-shops. there may have been japanese, probably there were, seeing they hold the lower half of the island, but i did not notice them, and there is, i am afraid, in that place which is so full of possibilities absolutely nothing for that go-ahead nation to do.
my pretty girls complained dreadfully. they looked after the shop and then there was nothing. in the winter they said they had skating and they liked the winter best, but the really bad time in places like saghalien and nikolayeusk were the two months when it was neither winter nor summer. then their only means of communication with the outside world, the river and the sea, was too full of ice to admit of navigation and yet was not solid enough for dog-sled, so that if the telegraph broke down, and it very often did, they are entirely cut off from the world. saghalien, of course, is worse off than the town, for on the mainland presumably there are roads of sorts that can be negotiated in case of necessity, but the island is entirely isolated. in the winter the mails take five days coming across the frozen sea from the mainland, and often when there are storms they take much longer. fancy living on an island that stretches over nearly ten degrees of latitude, which for five months in the year gets its mails by dog-sled and for two goes without them altogether! on the whole, there may be drawbacks to living in saghalien!
i left it at nine o'clock in the evening, after the darkness had fallen, and the police officer and the pretty girls saw me on board the steamer which was to take me back to nikolayeusk.
they loaded me with flowers and they were full of regrets.
“oh, madame, madame, how lucky you are to get away from saghalien!”
but i said truly enough that i felt my luck lay in getting there. and now that i sit in my garden in kent and watch the beans coming into blossom and the roses into bloom, look at the beds gay with red poppies and violas, cream and purple, or wander round and calculate the prospects of fruit on the cherry and the pear trees, i am still more glad to think that i know what manner of island that is that lies so far away in the eastern world that it is almost west.